Falling Upwards

How We Took to the Air

By: Richard Holmes

Narrated by: Gildart Jackson

Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

Falling Upwards tells the story of the enigmatic group of men and women who first risked their lives to take to the air and so discovered a new dimension of human experience. Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them, and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet in wholly unexpected ways is its subject.

Dramatic sequences move from the early Anglo-French balloon rivalries, the crazy firework flights of beautiful Sophie Blanchard, the revelatory ascents over the great Victorian cities and sprawling industrial towns of Northern Europe, the astonishing long-distance voyages of the American entrepreneur John Wise, and the French photographer Félix Nadar to theterrifying high-altitude flights of James Glaisher, FRS, who rose above sevenmiles without oxygen, helping to establish the new science of meteorology aswell as the environmental notion - so important to us today - of a "fragile"planet.

Balloons were also used to observe the horrors of modern battle during the American Civil War, including a memorable flight by General Custer.

Readers will discover the many writers and dreamers - from Mary Shelley to Edgar Allan Poe, from Charles Dickens to Jules Verne - who felt the imaginative impact of flight and allowed it to soar in their work. Moreover, through the strange allure of the great balloonists, Holmes offers another of his subtle portraits of human endeavor, recklessness, and vision.

©2013 Richard Holmes (P)2013 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

A Significant Factual-Interpretative Error

I stopped listening at the discussion of the Nazca Lines in Peru. As an anthropologist who has worked in the Andes for more than half a century, I couldn't believe the author's uncritical acceptance of popular fantasies claiming that the Nazca Lines may have been built by interstellar travelers or that balloons may have been used in order to see the lines. There is no evidence for these assertions, and they demonstrate Little knowledge or understanding of either pre-Columbian or contemporary Peru. Among other matters, Peruvians still draw lines on the earth/sand. It is no big deal. If I can't trust the author on a matter that I am familiar with, I can't trust him in general.